A growing school investment providing very little to justify it

If this newspaper's School Finance 101 series showed nothing else, it was that Illinois taxpayers have not been pinching pennies on education.

Since 1996, state taxpayers paid almost $200 billion into their schools, increasing the donation per student of $8,312 in 1996 to a current $12,674 per student.

Unfortunately, what they got in return for all that money was the knowledge that just 1 in 5 Illinois seniors will leave school ready for college or the workplace.

"It's pretty horrifying," said Jennifer Presley, who has studied the issue of college readiness for the Illinois Research Council at Southern Illinois University. "We've turned graduating from high school into an almost meaningless benchmark … you're seeing that in the data."

ACT test scores from the Prairie State Achievement Exam show only 27 percent of students in the Daily Herald's suburban coverage area -- 1 in 4 -- were prepared to earn a college C or better in science, social science, algebra and English. About half of area community college students must take remedial classes before beginning college work. And employers said they're seeing more and more students who aren't any better prepared for work, either.

Despite the huge influx of money during the period studied by the series, only two high school districts of 36 in the newspaper's coverage area had more than 50 percent of their students ready for college. The series found no real correlation between expenditures and student performance. Some schools spent more than average with poor results, while others spent less and got better results.

"We've seen huge increases in spending," Jeff Mayes, president of an association of Illinois CEOs involved in education policy, said in the series. "But with all the money we've spent, these scores haven't gone up. And so you have to ask: Does money really count?"

While much of the series focused on who was paying how much and who was being paid how much, and just how indecipherable Illinois school finance law is, it is impossible to judge the expenditures without analyzing what those expenditures bought.

School boards pointing at state politicians for not delivering education money in quantity or on time are repetitive arguments that only serve to disguise that increasing expenditures -- no matter where the funds originate -- are buying little. Teachers pointing at administrators or taxpayers pointing at teachers and administrators, arguing that they're paid too much, seems less significant than employers lamenting the fact that newly minted graduates can't do eighth-grade math.

In truth, if Illinois schools were sending students out into the world who could challenge their college professors or compete in a global economy instead of needing remedial classes to function, even these expenditures, twice the rate of inflation since 1996, wouldn't be much of an issue. It is only when one doesn't get what one pays for that the wisdom of the investment is questioned.

And when taxpayers give more and more and more money to teachers, administrators and this big bureaucracy to so little effect, it is time to question the value of the investment and challenge the status quo.

In other words, it's time to acknowledge that when it comes to really serving "the children," the answer isn't found in more and more money, managed and handed out the same old way.